The officers who failed to find her don't deserve compassion

At first, police did not believe Tess Richey had been murdered, expected her death to be ruled a “misadventure.”

- ROSIE DIMANNO

Tess Richey, 22, was reported missing on Nov. 25, 2017. Her mother found her body four days later, a day after two officers came within 40 metres of Richey's body but failed to find her. There appears no end to the minimizing of Richey's murder and the inept investigation that surrounded it, Rosie DiManno writes.

Then, after a post-mortem found the young woman — less than a week before she would have turned 23 — had been strangled and it became a homicide investigation, a wayward detail found its way into media reports, insider information attributed to police “sources”: Richey, it was alleged, had been working as an escort and had advertised her services. Which implied that her life choices had contributed to her murder.

That wasn’t true. Richey, an aspiring flight attendant, had gone on dating websites, as do many people, but had never worked in the escort business. “It was horrifying to read that,” Richey’s mother said later. “She was not making a living in the sex-trade industry. It’s a blatant lie.” Intended, a grieving Christine Hermeston claimed, to suggest her daughter had been living a highrisk life that had brought her to ruin in a downtown laneway.

The planted misinformation surfaced at exactly the same time that police were fending off public outrage over the apparent sloppy investigation into what had been, until Richey’s body was found at the bottom of an outdoor stairwell, a missing person case.

It was Richey’s mother and a friend who’d made the grisly discovery. Hermeston had undertaken the four-hour drive from her home in North Bay to search for the youngest of her five daughters. For several days, the frantic family had put up posters, undertaken their own search around the Gay Village where Richey had been seen, canvassing area residents, did the dogged legwork that police had not undertaken.